Experience Delivering Better Services by Using Salesforce for Non-Profits
The most critical decision for your organisation is choosing the right database platform. Non-profit professionals understand the value of every constituent interaction; under constant pressure to lower operating costs while building constituent loyalty, nonprofits can’t afford to miss an opportunity to deepen relationships. To achieve their objectives many organizations have adopted Salesforce as their customer relationship management software (CRM). Salesforce is an excellent choice for non-profit organizations.
The Salesforce platform is quite flexible and powerful to centralize the data management needs into a single system of non-profits. By tracking and managing programs, clients and operations all in one place, this system helps in removing data silos. It helps in connecting your entire non-profit to your supporters, partners, employees and programs to strengthen your community and deliver better programs and services.
Salesforce offers many functional features. It helps in non-profits to keep records of members, conversations with them, their preferences and interactions with prospects.
In this article, let’s discuss few strategic moves that your non-profits can make with Salesforce to supercharge relationship management.
Non-Profit Success Pack (NPSP)
Salesforce offers nonprofits an end-to-end solution called the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). The NPSP helps to organize data and keep-to-date information. Non-Profit Success Pack develops a foundation of a flexible platform that empowers non-profits of all the sizes to run their business in a better way and engage with their constituents more deeply and advance their missions.
Marketing Communications
The way we communicate has been changed by the popularity and extensive usage of mobile devices and social networks. Organizations with optimum usage of resources can amplify their social change efforts with strong marketing strategy and the right technology.
Following are the main features of Marketing Communications:
Email Marketing:
For non-profits fundraising, email marketing acts as its heart. Professional looking emails optimize deliverability. Using a variety of methods a non-profit can segment donors. With the help of segmentation, non-profits can choose specific groups for specific information customized for them to send the right message at the right time. This, in turn, increases the probability of achieving the desired results from a campaign.
Market Segmentation:
Market segmentation helps in maintaining a separate list of current member, past members, prospective members and board of directors. The non-profits team launch a campaign to encourage the past members to renew their membership. With the help of Salesforce, the team rather than using the same renewal reminder method can draft a special message for this group.
Social Media Engagement:
The one way through which we share what we care about in our personal lives is Social Media. Through social media networks, you can connect with people on 1 to 1 basis and foster the power to build long-lasting relationships with more people regardless of the location and time. Along with participating in the conversations Salesforce also allows your non-profits to efficiently measure your efforts and show the value of your organization’s investment in social media and improve your strategies.
Mobile Marketing:
Salesforce allows you to create, target, send and track all mobile messaging including email campaigns, SMS marketing campaigns to deliver the right message at the right time.
Use Web-to-Lead Feature in Salesforce:
Nonprofits publish forms on their website to collect information and give people a way to submit an inquiry. When a person fills out the form on the website, Salesforce’s Web-to-Lead feature creates a new Lead record in Salesforce. Using Web-to-Lead, tying the website form with Salesforce, it is easier to track leads and follow-ups.
Community Engagement
The key to building alignment and accelerating your mission is collaborating with funders, staff, members, volunteers and supporters. A secured environment is offered by Salesforce for non-profits to build communities of interest, purpose and action so that your entire ecosystem can work together to drive social change.
Non-profits can use the simple way to connect donors with each other and recipients. It helps non-profits in using communities for real-time collaboration, information sharing, and customer service. Users can share files, data, and records. And they can check into the community on any mobile device.
For instance: A non-profit’s big annual fundraiser offers an opportunity for reaping the benefits of creating a special community. The nonprofit can set up the community so only those on the event’s committee have access to it. Through the community, the team can document their plans, build a checklist of tasks, share graphics and program files, post-task updates, and manage the budget.
Tracking the Fundraising Data
It can be much more difficult for nonprofits to track and predict fundraising data than it is for for-profit businesses to track sales. Sometimes nonprofits are collecting straight cash donations, sometimes they’re providing a good or service for the funds they receive (e.g., selling t-shirts or doing a carwash), sometimes people are donating tangible items instead of cash, and sometimes the organizations receive grants. Tracking incoming funds and managing donor data can be complex, and many nonprofit employees may struggle to enter data accurately or completely.
You can empower your entire non-profit organization to cultivate donor relationships by breaking down silos and offering a 360 view of every interaction with a funder or volunteer. Salesforce for non-profits can help you in not only creating and growing donor relationships but also making the donation cycle from a pledge to payments. It also helps in offering a social, collaborative and mobile experience which today’s don’t expect.
Features:
● With donor management acquire a complete picture of your donors, volunteers, clients and other constituents in one place
● Raising funds and managing the donation cycle from a pledge to payment including individual donations and grants.
● Streamline your grants prospecting, management and reporting with Salesforce’s powerful automation and real-time analytics.
● Efficiently recruit, track, and manage volunteers with Salesforce and retain volunteers and generate powerful reports and analytics in real-time.
● Set up Automated Tasks in Salesforce
● With automated tasks in Salesforce, a non-profit can maximize its effectiveness.
For Instance: Users can create tasks in Salesforce that can be automated and assigned to individuals responsible for completing those tasks.
Your non-profits can generate automated reports and dashboard to keep people in the loop about the campaign’s progress through Salesforce. This helps in successfully meeting the deadlines of the campaign. Non-profits can benefit from many powerful features of Salesforce to be more effective and proficient and use the time to focus on the organization’s core business.
Data hygiene
Because of the sheer volume of data nonprofits collect and the inconsistencies in the way it’s collected and entered, nonprofits often have problems with incorrect, old, or duplicate data in Salesforce. There can also be multiple chapters of an organization entering data in different places or collecting it in different ways. And most organizations either don’t have enough staff to deal with data clean-up, or they simply don’t have anyone with the expertise to do so. Salesforce is only as powerful as the data it holds, so doing some regular house cleaning is crucial. If nonprofits don’t have the resources in place to handle data hygiene, it may be a good idea to look outside for help.
Analytics
Turn your nonprofit’s big data into big impact.
From programs to marketing to fundraising, many nonprofits struggle to get real-time answers to key questions: Which programs make the biggest impact? Which campaign was most effective? Where are we getting traction with donors? Measuring the effectiveness of a nonprofit is difficult. For-profit businesses have measures like top-line growth (revenue), bottom-line growth (revenue minus costs), and profit margin (net income divided by revenues). But nonprofits have to work harder to measure their success. Nonprofits are also getting more pressure to show their impact.
With Salesforce Analytics you can go beyond reports and dashboards – dynamically drill into data to identify opportunities and make better decisions. Quickly query and explore data across your systems to get exactly the information you need without being stuck in prebuilt reports and this desire to show impact is where Analytics Cloud comes in to help.
App Exchange
Your non-profits with the help of Salesforce can make use of pre-integrated solutions for marketing automation, events management, volunteer management, fundraising and more. You can extend the functionality of Salesforce with the third party tools. Thus the Salesforce AppExchange is a thriving marketplace of tools to extend Salesforce’s functionality. Available tools range from integration with popular email marketing tools to online donation tools to event management. There is also a whole crop of nonprofit specific applications, including apps used to track volunteers, manage auctions, track case management, and manage affordable housing programs.
To Summarize
By providing robust data-tracking and reporting capabilities, a CRM solution like Salesforce can help non-profits to streamline their internal management, analyze donor engagement and deepen their connections to supporters. They can transition from guessing next steps to making data-driven decisions, thereby optimizing their communications tactics and overall efficiency. With quantitative analysis backing their decisions, organizations can focus on pursuing their mission and make significant strides toward their cause.
